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BitKeeper EULA Forbids Working On Competition
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Oct 06, 2002 04:17 AM
from the that-isn't-the-santa-clause dept.
from the that-isn't-the-santa-clause dept.
Col. Klink (retired) writes "BitKeeper's new EULA forbids working on the competition. Larry McVoy has told Ben Collins that he can't use BK because he works on subversion (a free revision control program). In fact, you can't use BitKeeper if you OR your company have anything to do with competing software. Free Software advocates who were upset when Linus decided to use non-Free software now have the opportunity to say 'I told you so.'"
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BitKeeper EULA Forbids Working On Competition
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Only the gratis license is affected (Score:5, Insightful)
Subversion isn't quite up to par, yet, but it does seem like the switch to 2.6/3.0 "soon" would be a good time to switch revision control systems to something less... counter productive.
Re:Only the gratis license is affected (Score:5, Funny)
It makes me quiver with abject glee to know with relative certainty that authors of printed publications will never resort to individual licenses (rather than the kind of license that is required to, for instance, make a movie or adapt the story to the stage) that would abjectly forbid any other author or potential author of a book in a similar genre from reading!
Imagine if H.G. Wells would have declared that anyone reading his books would be strictly forbidden from publishing a novel in the genre that would become known as science-fiction.
Imagine if chip manufacturer X were to forbid other chip manufacturers from using their(X) chips or any product that uses their chips in the design or fabrication of the competing chips.
Imagine if you were forbidden from using ketchup in your meatloaf!! AAAAHHHHH!!!!! Hrm... okay. I'm slipping. Heh. Yeah. Anyway.
Regardless of how simple and striaght-forward the BitKeeper product may be, I think Mr. McVoy is forgetting that folks that do kernel development have been using tools such as gcc, as, emacs, vi, lint, m4 thingies, troff, make, info... XWindows (for the love of God!) Needless to say, your average kernel developer is probably not the typical oh-my-i-just-cant-figure-this-out-when-is-bill-go
sort of end user. If he really thinks he can bully the egg-head* community in such a fashion, he's either much more brilliant than he's coming off as or his visions of becoming a respected revision control system author are going to intersect quite abruptly with the particular variety of fate known as limited-lifespan (at least as it pertains to projects that have large groups of developers that just might actually work for a competitor).
On a different angle, if the kernel community does not decide to ditch BK for some reason, it will make for entertaining legal stories if/when Mr. McVoy starts having people hauled in. Can you imagine the kinds of goodies that will be drifting through the minds of those junior-assistant-undersecretary-to-the-person-who
Mr. McVoy, please. I beg of you. Our glorious leader is already making us look extremely silly and annoying to the rest of the planet! Please do not exaserbate the situation.
Praise Cheezewiz...
* this adjective used out of respect
Re:Only the gratis license is affected (Score:4, Insightful)
I can understand (to a degree) preventing someone from using BK for free to develop a competing product, but to rule out working on competing software period is somewhat more destructive.
Necessity truly is the mother of invention. We invent because of some dissatisfaction with the present way of doing things. To make something that is necessary (or even quite helpful) more expensive for anyone who wants to invent a better replacement is to deliberatly kill innovation.
I imagine that Edison used either oil or gas lights while working on the light bulb. Henry ford probably used some form of transportation other than his feet while preparing to make automobiles. Imagine if they had been unable to afford the increased cost?
I suppose next, we will see OS licenses that disallow use of a computer to develop a better OS, or chipsets that don't allow the development of a new chipset.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". The BK EULA is like the 'giants' forbidding Newton from standing on their shoulders. Perhaps the oil companies would like to charge $100/gallon if you work on electric cars?
Re:What does BitKeeper exactly do? (Score:5, Informative)
You can find a probably biased comparison here:
http://www.bitkeeper.com/Products.Comparisons.CVS
-- kryps
Sure are full of themselves! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't afford a good source management product, use CVS, we'll help you migrate off of it when the time comes.
Wow... We use CVS at work and certainly haven't felt it isn't "industrial enough" to handle what we're after. Quite the opposite in fact.
Broken builds?? What do they think the last tagged version of the stable branch is supposed to be for?
"plain text" a bad thing? I find I can usually trust products that keep plain things plain, much more than ones that try to over-complexify everything. If a developer can't handle managing several checkouts of a repository in his/her own work area, he/she probably doesn't deserve the title.
RCS limitations? Be nice to see some of the most prominent listed if they are such a big deal.
The multiple repository thing does seem interesting, but I'd think if it came to where you really needed it, something could be worked out using CVS without too much work... Actually, in practice it would seem better to get everything into the main repository as quickly as possible so everyone else can start testing on the code sooner, even if there was a bit more overhead associated with doing that.
Course, maybe this BitKeeper appeals to managers more than actual developers...
Re:What does BitKeeper exactly do? (Score:5, Interesting)
> "community" would donate enough money to allow
> him to accomplish that.
No, I wasn't. The community did keep me afloat for longer than I otherwise would have been, while I worked on getting corporate funding for a small team to finish and polish the hell out of arch.
Now an interesting question becomes: what does the bitkeeper license imply to IBM, HP/Compaq, Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, and other businesses that depend on the linux kernel?
This event points to a more general problem: the free software business world needs a better infrastructure for all projects, not just the kernel. Now they have one more reason to believe in the urgency of this need.
For what a EULA is worth (Score:4, Informative)
It's a New EULA, so the old one did not mention it?
The solution is simple: continue to use your existing version.
Re:For what a EULA is worth (Score:5, Informative)
The solution is simple: continue to use your existing version.
The old EULA is revoked automatically as soon as Bitmover changes the Bitkeeper test suite so that the old version no longer passes it. In essence, this means that Bitmover can revoke old licenses at any time.
IANAL, but I know I can't rely on Bitkeeper (the vendor doesn't want me to, obviously). Maybe the commercially sold version is different, I don't know.
Bitkeeper is probably really nice software, so we can only hope that Red Hat (or someone else) buys Bitmover one day and licenses Bitkeeper under the GPL.
Re:For what a EULA is worth (Score:5, Insightful)
If Red Hat is going to put money into a better version control system, I'd hope that that would be either Subversion or arch [regexps.com]. (The author is flat broke and has no web hosting unless someone gives him some, so that link may not work; also see here [gnu.org] and here [linuxjournal.com]). Arch is brilliant, functional, much more reliable than BitKeeper (at least, much more reliable than BitKeeper was when I used it)... and for someone as utterly friggin' brilliant as Tom Lord to be utterly penniless (as in, unable to buy beer, much less pay rent) is just wrong.
They can... if they purchase it! (Score:4, Informative)
If the submitter had followed the thread on LKML more closely he would have realized that it is only forbidden to use the *free* (i.e. openlogging) version of BK to develop a competing product. They can still *purchase* a commercial license and develop whatever they want with it.
-- kryps
Re:Consider ethics and software freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine, but you don't seem to understand that if everybody did what you do, you wouldn't have free software to enjoy. So, in short, you adopt a comfortable "I use the right tool for the job" attitude, you "get sick" of people who really stand for free software and finally use their software when it is done. Brilliant.
Re:Consider ethics and software freedom. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see nothing where Larry McVoy swears the license will never be changed to exclude anyone providing non-BK repositories. I havent seen a mail where he swears that people working for for-profit corporations wont be excluded. I havent seen him promise that BK wont exclude anyone with a beard either in the future.
How do you make a judgement then? How well does it do what it's supposed to do? How well does it do what you need it to do? Well, how much does that matter when _you may not be allowed to use it at all tomorrow_? What value does it have for you then?
Software freedom isnt necessarily the deciding factor if your choice matters the next five minutes. But when you make a choice that must be valid over a decade youd better have a crystal ball to see how whoever decides the license is going to act for the next ten years.
Re:Consider ethics and software freedom. (Score:5, Funny)
We feel this is necessary to ensure the viability of our business.
Unfortunately your hammer was a free sample you obtained from the International Hammer Show 2001, and not the full commercial version.
We do sell a commercial hammer with no restrictions for $99.95.
Sincerely,
Ron O'Nail, U.S. Hammer Corp.
the path of least resistance (Score:3, Interesting)
Larry McVoy has an entirely reasonable business concern. He has also now provided the momentum for that concern to materialize. This may provide the motivation for Subversion to produce the cvs.succ that we all wish for late at nights, writing posts such as this one.
~ pS
Re:Why don't they use standard CVS? (Score:5, Informative)
CVS has too many inherent limitations to make it a good choice for large-scale projects. Although it's been around for just ever and is fairly solid, there are a couple of issues that make CVS a sub-optimal choice.
First, CVS is built on top of RCS and, as such, doesn't handle binary files. Okay, that's a fib; it sorta kinda does, but it's very klunky, and easily prone to errors. Further, it's easy for the "binary-ness" of a file to be lost (i.e. be treated as text), resulting in all kinds of nasty corruption. Best Practices will avoid this, but everyone has to be on their toes all the time.
Second, CVS has no notion of "transactions". Let's say you check in a bugfix/new feature to the kernel. The change involves modifying six different files. CVS does not see this checkin as a single transaction, but six completely separate ones. So a lot of information about the scope of a given change is not easily found. The only way you can know a particular change affected multiple files is by noticing that their checkin comments are identical. Further, if you perform a checkin against multiple files and one or more of them has a conflict (someone else checked in a change before you did), CVS will simply halt at the conflicting file; earlier files successfully checked in up to that point are not backed out. Thus, the repository is left in an inconsistent state. Best Practices can avoid this but, again, everyone has to be on their toes.
Other source control systems don't have these problems. In particular, Subversion is transaction-based, so groups of files checked in at once either all get checked in, or none of them do, keeping the repository consistent. Also, Subversion handles arbitrary meta-data for each file, including its MIME type, so the "binary-ness" of a file cannot be lost or modified unless you expressly change its MIME type. Even better, Subversion will automatically perform newline translation to/from your local platform when checking out/in text files.
For small projects with small numbers of people, CVS is perfectly okay. But beyond a certain scale, CVS's limitations start to get in the way, and you need something better.
Schwab
Re:Why don't they use standard CVS? (Score:5, Insightful)
cvs works for developers with a clue about cvs. that's not to say that a better version control system couldn't be developed - one can and should. but saying cvs is crap for large projects is demonstrably false.
Too bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully one of the teams working on Free alternatives will get it to a stage suitable for maintaining the kernel.
I wonder what they'll be using when linux 4.x rolls around? Maybe linux will still be using bitkeeper and the HURD will be using something like subversion (assuming the HURD becomes easy enough for us mortals to use by then :)
I'm hoping that by the time I wake up this afternoon there will be interesting comments by the top kernel hackers, the FSF and Linus about this.
Illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling that if anyone challenged the agreement, the law would force it to change. Granted you have to accept the EULA in order to use the software...but if I made a EULA that said you were no longer allowed to own a firearm if you used my product, it would be tossed to the wind in a second. In a sense, Bitmover's EULA infringes on my right to compete, yes/no? If Bitmover doesn't want people to use an idea they have, they should file a patent for that idea, or otherwise rely on copyright/trademark law to prevent people from "stealing."
Bait-and-switch will get them what they deserve. (Score:5, Interesting)
"The sad part is that many software companies tries to control HOW you use the program, WHO uses it and WHAT they use it for."
Yes, and changing the license AFTER you have already started using the software is bait-and-switch.
Thanks to this abusive policy, Bitkeeper now has tons and tons of bad publicity. With certainty, the bad publicity will cost them more than any extra money they would have made from the bait-and-switch. Incidentally, did I mention bait-and-switch?
Every company that would have paid for the Bitkeeper product interprets this sneaky activity very clearly: If they can do sneaky things to Linus, they can do this to our company, too. We should stay away from them. They are not trustworthy.
This is typical of technically capable people who know nothing about marketing and think there is nothing to know: Work for years to build the product, and sink the company in an afternoon.
Truly innovative industry leaders like Microsoft would never do something so low and mean as change the contract after companies have already decided to use the product: EULA (End User License Agreement) for a security bug fix [bsdvault.net]. (Don't croak, it's a joke. Don't blink, read the link.)
VA Software, owner of Slashdot, uses a sneaky tactic, also. As you can see from the stock price [yahoo.com], the VA Software executives are people of great business insight. At the top of every Slashdot article, it says, "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them." This sounds like you own your comments, doesn't it? However, the OSDN Terms of Service [osdn.com] says at section 4, CONTENT, paragraph 6, that they own your comments, too. It's as though Chevy sold you a car, but gave its executives the right to come around and use it, also. (I don't like sneakiness. All my comments belong solely to me. Slashdot would not have the importance it has now if the members knew that they were losing control over their writing.)
It's no fun to work at an abusive company. We are seeing a rise in the number of sneaky contracts. This seems due to, not only technically capable people who are ignorant of marketing, but also the presence of people with no technical knowledge at technically oriented companies. These people cannot contribute to the real work of the companies; all they can do is invent ways to abuse the customer.
As companies become more abusive, it becomes more miserable to work there. If you are good at what you do, quit and get a job somewhere where people are treated like people.
The final EULA: EULAs are becoming more and more abusive. I decided to jump several steps ahead and write the final EULA:
- I can do anything I like.
- You have no power.
- You can't say anything bad about me.
- Everything belongs to me.
I knew a 3-year-old who said this. He has since become an adult, which is more than I can say for some executives.RMS was right (Score:5, Insightful)
Many years before this happened Richard pointed out the flaws of relying on non free software. Will any of the slashdot posters who called him crazy then apologize now?
Linus is wrong and Richard was right. You can't be "pragmatic" and use the best tool for the job if you want to keep your freedom.
Free tools, Free chips, RMS and LGPL (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to understand that it is exactly this issue that causes a lot of the problems. It is really worth reading all of the talk transcript [eurorights.org] from the guy who is going to debate the RIAA VP next week. It is exactly because of the desire to extract every dime available under the utility curve that leads to the desire to create non-transferable licensing (restrict right of first sale) and a host of other evils that almost everyone objects to.
How awful is it if you actually PAID MONEY for the software? Face it, if your boss doesn't have bucks, you don't have a job. Somebody's paying for the Linux kernel to be developed - if it costs 1% more, is that a big deal?
It isn't that simple. If a commercial tool is needed to participate, it limits the scope. Not everyone working on any given free source project is getting paid. Ok, so you can grab bitkeeper for free to work on the Linux kernel, that's sort of ok, but now they say you can't work on some projects if you do that. Sort of silly if you ask me, since it just gives them (BitMover) a black eye in the community and it won't slow down the development of the free alternative. It is, in fact, pretty easy to argue the opposite based on discussion of the issue here. Lots of people who were on the fence for this issue are going to move away from their product.
The transcript that I linked above makes the point that we don't actually know if BitMover is hurting or helping themselves. If they just GPLed their tool, and charged for support, commercial licenses, and other stuff, they might do better in the long run. It is a leap of faith, but you gotta ask how much the change of EULA language will hurt them in the long run. It will encourage more people to push the free alternative, and work to make that tool competetive. If it was GPLed, they would have the whole community behind them, and a lot of people would buy their books and support in gratitute for the gift of their software.
These issues are even more stark if you want to work on free hardware. The free tools are in a primitive state, so you are in a bind of choosing a less desirable tool vs something free. The producers of the commercial tools are afraid of their business drying up, so they won't do anything if it might help the free tools compete with them. You say, ok, so I'll find a tool I can use for free on free hardware even if it is closed source, but that slows down the free alternatives.
This is where you start to get just how important GPL is and why it is such an important innovation. One of the big problems in the sub-chip level hardware design is that the big tool makers have everything locked up and they don't talk to each other very well.
There are some open standards, but the whole mentality of closed intellectual property creates this situation where the best minds are all working to recreate the same tools and chip functions in each closed universe. This is even worse than it is for software because there aren't nearly as many people working in hardware as with software, and it is getting more complex just as fast.
My gut tells me that any company that makes the leap of faith and frees their intellectual property under GPL or similar terms will get back much more than they give up. It's hard, if not impossible to prove this, but instictively we know this when we look deeply at the issues.
On a side note, RMS doesn't think that the GPL is appropriate for hardware. It's bits all the way down until you start replicating the physical parts, and unlike software, it isn't possible to actually use it until you physically replicate it.
Nothing stops me from downloading the ISO images of RedHat's latest release cutting as many one-offs as I want on my CDR, or even making a run of CDs, and cutting them out of the loop completely. I can even offer my own support services to compete with RH. Doing this with chip or board level fabrication has considerably higher entry barriers, so potential "Red Hat Hardware" vendors would have less to worry about.
As long as I've come this far, I want to finish with a comment about the LGPL. From where I stand, RMS's stance on the LGPL is a take-back that is just as damaging, if not more so, as the EULA change being discussed. LGPL gives you a lot more choice in terms of integrating free and proprietary subsystems and components. Where free libraries have significantly extended functionality, he explicitly recomends GPL over LGPL. As an example if you want all the GNU goodies that make command line work so nice in bash, you have to either write your own or be ready to release your entire project under GPL. I might even agree with his goal of all software being free, but my choice is limited. What if I'm doing this work for an employer who is not ready to release the whole thing? I can't choose GPL, but I could choose LGPL.
This is the one case where I would claim that it goes beyond style, and the message itself actually hurts the movement.
Re:RMS was right (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely right. Lest we forget, EULA clauses not allowing people to develop competitive (esp. Free Software) products is something Microsoft does [slashdot.org]. And they were rightly derided for that. Are we saying just because Bitmover are giving away free stuff that we're not going to apply the same standards?
Re: RMS was right (Score:5, Funny)
> Hating RMS is a religion.
For agnustics?
If only if it were so innocent (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd agree with your perspective concerning Bitkeepers IP rights if this was the only way this clause is used in a shrink-wrap license. However, it is more often used in court in a semi-fraudulent manner. More often than not, Bitkeeper could claim that a developer was "contaminated", and unless it was *very carefully* documented otherwise, with the sort of documentation rarely available in an open-source project, it can shut down the competitition. I'd hate to think that Bitkeeper's lawyers would do something so cynical, but its a common practice with this sort of contract. About the only remedy is to start the entire project over from scratch and work in "double-clean" rooms, but that's practically impossible in an open source project.
Kudos to Bitkeeper's lawyers for proving that fascism is alive and well in the commercial software industry when it comes to competing with open source projects. Until they drop this clause open-source developers should boycott their tools, because doing otherwise is too great a risk. Maybe they'll get the message, if not, Bitkeeper will go the way of gopher, another product which got a license like this and was dropped like a hot potato by developers in favor of www, and of course the competition ended up being better. :-)
Re:BitMover is NOT the "bad guys" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why it would bother kernel developers.
This is explicitly allowed by the GPL, so for any kernel developers to have a problem with this would be hypocritical. Anyone can use any GPL software in house in a production environment with as many custom changes they want without releasing those changes to everyone in the world as long as they do not distribute their custom version outside their organization. Perhaps you meant something else than what your words clearly say? That you mean an "in house" "production" environment is somehow equivalent to distributing a version of a GPL software package outside (not in house) your organization with custom changes and not releasing the source code? That would be illegal, but that's not what you said.
Not it is not. Their new license apparently goes well beyond that. It says that developers using (the free license version of) their software for a non-competing product, such as the kernel, can not work on a competing product, regardless of what other revision control software they use to build the competing product. So, no Linux kernel developers, or anyone else that uses the "free" version of BK, can contribute to some competing products. This is quite different than you portray.
I don't believe you understand what the issue is.
One would hope that the community produces a better alternative under the GPL. If BM wants to limit the use of their software to create a competing product then I don't see a problem with this as much as what they are doing, which is described above.
Has no one here any idea of what a "business" is? (Score:4, Insightful)
No business in their right mind is going to help a competetor take their market share. Maybe BitKeeper can't help if Subversion takes that market on its own, but they are not going to help them do it.
Disclaimer: I have a huge interest in Subversion, and I've been contributing to their mailing list for almost a year. I love Subversion. But I still implore all you Slashdot hippies: do not assume that all non-free software is evil, and do not make BitKeeper the bad guy just because they want to make money.
Free software depends on a few companies' ability to actually make money developing and using free software. Without industry support, free software will never make it past a select few geeks' basement computers. If you like free software, then you should support BitKeeper's decision. BitKeeper has helped the FS community in the past, and their support for the kernel project has been wonderful. Support them, help the FS industry grow, and everyone benefits.
In Related News... (Score:5, Funny)
The BSA will be knocking on the door any minute... follow the white rabbit.
Alan Cox? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to point out that Alan Cox works for RedHat, whose operating system includes CVS. I would venture to guess that RedHat hackers have contributed to CVS, at the very least with a 1-line diff here or there. This makes RedHat both a reseller and a developer of CVS, and even if he doesn't personally have anything to do with CVS (doubtful) he is forbidden from using the openlogging version.
I find it ironic that at a time when BitKeeper is trying to sway developers toward their product, they create onerous conditions which prevent a prominent developer and political spokesman from using said product on any sort of trial basis.
Technically, I suppose I'm not allowed to use BitKeeper either, since I've written (and released, I think; I'll have to double-check) an add-on to CVS which parses and cross-references checkin logs.
The really funny thing is that CVS is quite prevalent in the free software world, where it is extremely common to create patches and add-ons. The most effective referrals to BitKeeper would be from CVS hackers or those otherwise extremely experienced with it, but by preventing precisely these people from trying BitKeeper out, the one thing that could help BitKeeper the most -- a public defection from a "pet project" -- is verboten.
It's rare that we get to see such an obvious case of shooting oneself in the foot.
CVS is *NOT* equivalent to BK (was "Alan Cox?") (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. You entire argument rest on the premise that CVS "contains substantially similar capabilities" to BitKeeper. It doesn't... not just in my eyes, but in the eyes of Larry McVoy and BitMover. Larry has repeatedly stated that if CVS was good enough, he'd never have had to start developing BK in the first place. CVS is fundamentally flawed in its design, and doesn't come close to BK in terms of capabilities. By far the biggest one is its lack of changesets, but there are others, too. Hence, RedHat shipping CVS has no bearing on use of BK by any RH employees. Now if Red Hat shipped TrueChange, Perforce, or (more relevant in this case) Subversion, then it would be a different matter. And even if they did, I'm sure Larry would make an exception, or modify the license slightly. He's a reasonable guy, and wants to do the right thing, but at the same time, he has a business to run, and staff to pay, and it's perfectly reasonable for him to take steps to protect that.
Please see Larry's comments (and responses) (Score:3, Informative)
1) "In fact you can't use BitKeeper if you OR your company have anything to do with competing software."
The above applies to
Furthermore, Larry has demonstrated that even if you
2) It has been made very clear by several of the core developers that accessibility to Linus's merges has been made much easier since his trial/adoption of BK. See here [theaimsgroup.com], here [theaimsgroup.com], and here [theaimsgroup.com].
3) This is hardly a "new EULA."
Please see the thread at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=10
Read the whole discussion on LKML. (Score:5, Informative)
"
From: Larry McVoy
Subject: Re: New BK License Problem?
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 16:44:06 -0700
> And that's perfectly fair. However as worded in your license today, the
> individuals who work for those companies and have nothing to do with
> the competitive software you are worried about can't use your product
> to work on open source software.
Yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean we can't make exceptions, we can
and do.
> defined on www.opensource.org, may apply for a waiver to
>
> stating
> 1) Which company they work for
> 2) Which Open Source Project(s) they are going to be using the
> Bitkeeper software for
> 3) Identify if they are working on this project in their "free" time or
> as part of their
> job definition
>
> If granted the waiver will only cover the stated Open Source project(s)
> you have named. If you expand your use of the BitKeeper software to
> other Open Source project(s) you will need to apply for a waiver for
> those project(s) as well.
If *I* had suggested this language I would have been flamed off the face
of the earth. The people who are complaining the loudest are complaining
that BitKeeper limits their choices or takes their freedom away or whatever.
They absolutely *despise* any sort of authority figure and the idea of
coming begging to BitMover for a waiver each time just makes them crazy. "
In short?
If you want to use Bitkeeper for the development of something to replace it, you have to purchase a commercial license. Otherwise, you can use the "gratis" license.
Re:Read the whole discussion on LKML. (Score:4, Informative)
In short?
If you want to use Bitkeeper for the development of something to replace it, you have to purchase a commercial license. Otherwise, you can use the "gratis" license.
This isn't an accurate statement, or at best it's misleading. Say you want to work on two projects -- one a version control program, the other the Linux kernel. For the version control stuff, you use your own software (or CVS or anything not BK), and for Linux you use BK (which apparently you don't have to do, but it integrates best). Nope, can't do it. Because you work on a competing project, you can't use BK for free for anything. I think this is the biggest problem.
Apparently you're allowed to buy your own license, but most people don't have $5,000 to shell out (I've seen the price list) for a single copy.
Things like this... (Score:5, Funny)
- "by using this software, you agree to give me your car and talk to a jar of pickels at work for the first five minutes of every day."
- "by using this software, you agree to agree to the previous agreement, section D, which can be found in records department 41, level 9, building B. Yeah, see them to find out what you just agreed to, sucker."
- "by using this software, you agree to tell me when you encounter bugs instead of emailing me I'll never use your software because it doesn't work good!"
Sigh... the fun I could've had...or
arch (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody used it for a big project?
aegis: a free software alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Re:aegis: a free software alternative (Score:4, Informative)
However, the process implemented by Aegis closely mirrors the Linux development process: a developer makes changes, some subsystem maintainer reviews it, and Linus integrates it into the official tree. But there's a drawback: this only works if all developers have access to the same repository, on the same filesystem.
Aegis has got a distributed development model, but it doesn't offer the same repository tracking features as Bitkeeper. I don't know if this is relevant in the kernel context, IIRC Linus has complained more than once that the repository tracking (which links changesets to particular repositories/revisions) prevents him from automatically applying patches to the master repository.
BK Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
A) The license forbids you to use BK to further a direct competitor to BK. Distributing a competitor, while using BK, like Red Hat does, is allowed.
B) This license is the FREE license. Remember the saying, "Beggars can't be choosers?" They can't. Are you using BK for free? Then you can't expect to choose the license. If you buy the program, you can develop whatever you like with it.
C) Anyone still has the ability to be a kernel hacker without using BK whatsoever. The old tools still work, Linus and everyone else still accepts standard patches. It's just the old tools are actually worse than BK. BK was chosen purely on technical merits, it's only the license that's raising questions.
Point B) is important. Because this is the FREE license, it means that BM is not violating anti-trust laws by forbidding competition, because you can purchase the product, and get unrestricted use. Companies are not required to provide free samples of their products to competitors to help them out. Also, it means that BM is NOT acting like MS when they pulled the same stunt in their EULA. (Adding a clause stating that you cannot use MS products to harm MS in any way).
Summary: Bit Mover is acting reasonably, and completely within their rights as a company to define the acceptable uses of their free gift to users. The issue should is not whether or not Bit Mover is 'cheating' people. The issue now is whether or not to use Bit Keeper personally.
hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought EULAs were unenforcable, and usually get laughed out of court. I am no expert, so help me out on this one.
Can't Work On Competition... (Score:3, Insightful)
Prices for BitKeeper (from BitKeeper) (Score:5, Informative)
If you want the short version, it's $5,800 for a single license, and then $1,200 / year starting the second year (the first year's included in the base price) for service and upgrades (and you have to keep it current. You can't just pay $1,200 3 years down and try and get upgrades).
So anyone who says that an Open Source developer should just "buy themselves a copy", isn't really understanding that you don't go to Best Buy and plunk down $50.
Re:Prices for BitKeeper (from BitKeeper) - removed (Score:5, Informative)
That was clearly marked as confidential not to be disclosed. See page 7
right above the price list. Posting it is a blatent violation of our
copyright and causes our company material damage. If our lawyers find
that link still working tomorrow morning at 8am, you'll be the first
entity we have sued for copyright violation. Ask around, what you are
doing is serious with serious legal exposure for you.
I'm not exactly sure why I'm not allowed to post it, as nothing says "you may not post this", but it is copyrighted to them, but I don't really know what that means. They're probably just using the fact that they have more lawyers than me (greater than zero vs. zero) to bully me around.. but ah well. I suppose I don't really care about BK anymore.
Re:Prices for BitKeeper (from BitKeeper) - removed (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of the emails I got back:
[my email quoted]
> But I suppose I'll take it down. And you're causing your company more
> material damages in what you're doing than what I'm doing.
[his email]
Actually, every time you slashdot kiddies get your undies in a bundie our
sales go up. Thanks.
Just thought I'd share that..
Blatant violation of commercial ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
Now about this blatant monopolistic and ridiculous license. I may understand a commercial interest when someone declares a agreement void because I work on something that may hinder my partner. Development, production are things that are interim to a work where I and my partners should trust each other ofr a common cause. Using or developing some product while I do the same thing "on the side" for a concurrent product, is somehow a dubious behaviour from my side.
However sell/resell? Who's the jerk that wrote this license? Who's the stupid lawyer that forgets centuries of commercial ethics and practices? Who is he to hinder my right of choice and the right of choice of my clients? Any exclusivety on distributing, selling or lending anything is a conception that immediately forces a special agreement of rights and duties between two partners, sharing a common profit. Not something that "I should do or else". This is monopolism and it is ethicaly criminal to state such things in this way. No matter I get this thing for free or under a fee, claiming that I have not a right to choose what is best for me is the worst of dictatorships ever. They hinder the very principal of market with this.
Imagine this situation. I have a market. I try to find the best product so that this market lives on. Under this agreement either I cannot test their product if I sell something similar, I am forced to stop selling it to test their stuff or I have to pay them a fee to test their product. This, I would just call blackmail. If everyone starts doing it, it would be much worse than Windows EULAs.
Missing the point.. (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people seem to commenting that there's nothing wrong with BitKeeper being licensed as it is. This isn't really being argued ..
The argument is that because BitKeeper's license is as it is, that the Linux kernel developers shouldn't be using it.
Change of license terms (Score:4, Insightful)
Lately we see more and more license changes for existing software, BitKeeper and various Microsoft products are only the most notable cases. License changes accompany updates and patches, or it's just a document on some website that changes.
Most Software isn't ever a `finished' product, it's subject to changes called `new version', `upgrade' or `patch'. Often the customers depend on having the latest version of a software, be it for security reasons, compatibility issues, or just part of a leasing contract for the software. The software makers use these changes in the software to change the license terms in the software. In the BitKeeper example, someone using BitKeeper in a large project probably depends on it, or it would at least cause a lot of additional work and delay the project to switch from BK to something else.
This means, that even subtle license changes may have a huge effect on anyone depending on that software, done right such a license change might even ruin someones business (imagine someone using free BK on some project competing with BK, and imagine BK had gone one step further and made their "no competition" clause mandatory on all new licenses. Done just a few months before some critical timeline this might have killed the whole project. Even so any project using BK for a competing open-source product would probably have a hard time or even falter).
To protect businesses from being at the whim of software-makers there should be some regulations in place, that only allow license changes within reasonable limits, and demand that such changes are announced some time beforehand, so the customers have time to react. Most companies protect their business by making sure that they can't be cut of from any resource they depend on, they should realize that software is just such a resource and enforce license terms that don't allow for ugly surprises due to one-sided changes. But since few companies have the leverage to change Microsofts license terms i think there's a need for legislation considering software license changes.
BitKeeper's the enemy, Stallman was RIGHT (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be like MS saying you can't use MS Word if your using it to write up a document critical of MS, or to write up source code for something competing with an MS product.
Most of these EULA terms are either unenforcible practically, or simply would not be upheld in a court of law. I believe the anti-competitive terms in this EULA are both. Firstly, as I said before, no court is going to enforce such non-sense. To do so would usher forth an era where every product includes a license forbidding you to use it if you work for or help a competitor. Secondly, this is simply unenforcible, or largely so. Why should anyone abide by this? There are no consequences if they don't, except perhaps being forced to stop using it. This is not a case where any financial damage enters the picture, so there's no potential cost to violating the license. Third, even if it is enforcible within the US, that can easily be side-stepped by hosting one's project outside of the US, where the US has no jurisdiction.
What really annoys me about this BitKeeper people is their audacity to say that they are actually trying to help the community. No, they are not. They are doing this to make money, not to help the community. Its fine that they want to make money, but its not fine that they try to say that a Free Software project isn't trying to help the community, and that they are. The Ben Collins was right not to help BitKeeper, as BitKeeper has now proven by these draconian licensing terms. Helping non-free projects will invariably harm the Open Source (OSI-compliant) and Free Software (FSF-compliant) communities, in several regards. Firstly, it will encourage people to use non-free software. Secondly, as non-free software will become more popular and universal, the community will become more vulnerable to draconian EULA licenses like BitKeeper's.
That aside, this is just proof that Stallman was right. You can't rely on a product with a EULA. They will always include draconian licensing terms. We should be switching over to Subversion and supporting that.
Supporting non-free software will always hurt the cause of Free Software, and will ultimately hurt development of Free Software (which includes the GNU/Hurd; GNU/Linux; and the Free-, Open-, and Net -BSDs.
What do you feel is threatening you? (Score:3, Insightful)
My response has been and will always be: "What are you afraid of? Our clear objective is to do it better, keep our lead, solve customers' problems, give good service, and not sit on our asses and collect checks."
Just do it better. There are enough incompetent people in the world. We shouldn't have such a weak view of ourselves that we fear THEM, should we?
Investors don't like to hear that, but then I suppose, it's hard to keep fear from the equation.
If Bitkeeper really wants to be around they should just make sure their product is better than the competition's. If there exists someday a free software alternative that is as good, they they had better make sure they excel in the service area, that they respond quickly and promptly to their clients' needs.
If the free software alternative exceeds their closed source version, then they should switch to it. They could lay off part of their developers, save a bundle, and hire more service folks. They can then happily maintain their extraordinaryily content clients with the high level of support and care to which they have become acustomed.
It's really simple, IMHO. Your fear will end up consuming you until such a time as you end up nothing but an insane reactionary, screaming and hurling insults at your last loyal client.